A cold wind over Cumbria, the smell of snow in the air and an overnight dusting of it across the fells around Dufton.
First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window
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The last time I was here, walking the Pennine Way with my father, there had been no snow dust of white hairs in my beard or hair. We’d had a hell of a day stumbling over Cross Fell in thick mist, but I had retained an affection for the trim little farming village in its neat green dale where we’d stayed the night – £2.50 apiece for B&B.
A cup of coffee in the Tea-by-the-Way Café at Dufton, a saunter round the long village green, and Jane and I were ready for the hills. Goldfinches were tentatively cheeping in the leafless sycamores of the stone-walled lane up the Pur Gill’s cleft, and that wonderful bubbling cry of curlews, so hauntingly evocative, came down from the moors where they would be pairing up for nesting and rearing. Spring was evidently moving in curlew blood, but its green fingers hadn’t yet stirred any response in the trees or wayside plants of these high Pennines.
Looking back above Purgill House, we saw Dufton cradled in green inbye land, the wide vale of the River Eden beyond, and standing magnificently on the western skyline the humpy backs of the Lakeland fells. We watched a snow shower moving across the landscape in Blakean shafts of sunlight, trailing a white hem that clung to the highest peaks and ridges in the thinnest of skins.
Once we had skirted the sharp cone of Dufton Pike and turned up a narrow side dale towards the moors the green road we were following became rocky and dark, and the sides of the dale slop4ed thick with tumbled boulders and charcoal-coloured slack. Lead-miners had burrowed the cleft into a warren of pitch-black levels, and their smelting kilns and spillways and spoil hummocks lay all around. Above the desolation made by those long-gone delvers in the dark, lay the high moor, where we found a stone-built shooting box on the bank of cold, steely and half-frozen Great Rundale Tarn. Coming unexpectedly over the skyline, I shocked a pair of Canada geese who were sailing in the tarn, contemplating connubiality; frantic honking and splashing signalled their displeasure.
It was too damn cold to hang about. We turned about, put our heads down into the buffeting half-gale and pushed back downhill, the fifty-mile view before us blurred by wind tears. We turned along the beautiful wooded valley that lies like a secret behind the nape of Dufton Pike, and were soon back on to the Pennine Way and bowling down to Dufton.
Start: Dufton car park, near Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria POSTCODE (OS Ref NY690250)
Road: Dufton is signposted from Appleby-in-Westmorland (A66).
Walk: (8 ½ miles, moderate, OS Explorer OL19): Right along road from car park, round left bend; on following right bend by Old Dufton Hall, ahead on stony lane (‘Pennine Way’/PW). In 150 m at foot of slope PW forks left; but keep right here (‘bridleway’) up walled lane for 3 ½ miles, passing Purgill House (696257) and mine workings of Threlkeld Side, to reach shooting box by Great Rundale Tarn (729283). Return for 2 miles past mines. Under Dufton Pike, right over wall stile at yellow-topped post (704268), down to another post, over stile and right along track through Great Rundale Beck valley (yellow arrows). At clapper bridge (692273), left on PW to Dufton.
Conditions: Upper moors can be cold, wet and inhospitable – dress appropriately!
Lunch: Stag Inn, Dufton (01768 351608; thestagdufton.co.uk); Tea-on-the-Way Café, Dufton (01768 352334)
Accommodation: Brow Farm B&B, Dufton, CA16 6DF (01768-352865; browfarm.com)
Information: Appleby-in-Westmorland TIC (01768-351177);